“... long history of close relations. The story began with a marriage between a seventh-century Tibetan king and a Chinese princess. In Britain a royal family of foreign origin has been cheerfully marrying more or less exclusively with foreigners until quite recently, but diplomatic marriages in early medieval East Asia were a fraught affair – the young Chinese ...”

“... fortunate, like Pericles’; and 25 years later Pericles was still immediately recognisable in James Shirley’s sledgehammer puns in Arcadia (1640): ‘Tire me? I am no woman. Keep your tires to yourself. Nor am I Pericles Prince of Tyre.’ Indeed, one way to suggest a noisy crowd circa 1609 was to invoke an audience for Pericles: describing a packed ...”

“... friends, his only link with the world of people who care for him.Harry’s dead parents, Lily and James, were not ordinary humans but a powerful witch and wizard. The Dursleys seldom speak about them, and when they do it’s always with contempt, but as Harry grows up he begins to learn about them and to learn that he, too, is a wizard, though he is not ...”

“... one raid, a near miss blew a bus off course; it went through the window of Sainsbury’s on the King’s Road. ‘I was going out to see if I could do anything,’ Grisewood reported. ‘When I got to the door, David called out: “Tell them they can’t bring any of the wounded in here. This dugout is full up.” And he went on reading aloud “The Hunting ...”

“... record already has a title, ‘He Who Makes the Sky Grey’, but no release date is in sight. The king’s son has high hopes for the recording. He recently called a press conference in order to claim that the project ‘intends to bridge the gap between East and West’. Meanwhile, Jackson is in the habit of smiling widely beside his new friend. Things are ...”

“... and in another language; many émigrés or refugees or transplanted folk (‘homeloose’ in James Wood’s coinage) end up with a rusty, old-fashioned command of their language of origin and an imperfect mastery of the newly acquired tongue. There are a few exceptions, but it is more usual to have one language for the library and another for the bedroom ...”

“... audio recordings of Huey Long exciting crowds as big as these with his pitch of ‘Every Man a King,’ also to Father Coughlin, the anti-semitic ‘radio priest’ from Michigan, just to remind myself of the authentic sound of American demagoguery. But to see a true analogy for an Obama rally, one need only attend almost any large black church on a Sunday ...”

“... Israeli rule. Surely it would have been better, as the intelligence men had concluded, to allow King Hussein to continue integrating Palestinians in Jordan, thus eroding Palestinian identity? There was not a single area, during the 1967 war, in which the military behaved in a way that was consistent with its earlier analysis. Some might call this evidence ...”

“... roller-skating than to art (it is hung, somewhat lazily, with a few giant works such as F-111 by James Rosenquist), but it will be divided up for future shows. It is on the fifth floor that Taniguchi scales the architecture down, proportions the galleries nicely, and allows the collection of the Painting and Sculpture Department (P&S) to take over. The ...”

“... the ruck of political preferment is itself a symptom of the ideology. One who plays Flimnap to the King of Lilliput is Anthony Giddens of the LSE. Writing a while ago of the cosmically vacant notion of globalisation, he remarked that ‘a million dollars is a lot of money for most people. A stack of [presumably one thousand] thousand-dollar notes would be ...”

“... that Spufford put together for the Guardian last year; but on ‘The Island’, Aslan is king: from the moment I first encountered The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to when I was 11 or 12, the seven Chronicles of Narnia represented essence-of-book to me. They were the Platonic Book of which other books were imperfect shadows. For four or five ...”

“... abandon a crusade in which they have invested so much. After a lifetime’s campaigning to prove James Hanratty’s innocence, the incorruptible Paul Foot refused to accept the DNA evidence that after all Hanratty had raped Valerie Storie and therefore must have been guilty of the A6 murder. Ultimately, we are not dealing with rival scientific theories. We ...”

“... and Sure Hope – with brandishing the torch of faith against the established church.Hopes that James I, who succeeded Elizabeth in 1603, would cut puritans some slack were dashed by the instituting of new church canons. Some protested and were suspended; most capitulated. A brave few took a stand. In 1612 Edward Wightman, who dismissed the Trinity as a ...”

“... for their sound. Hawkers were the voice of many cities – the travel writer and historian James Howell advised 17th-century tourists on the continent to keep their windows open when lodging at an urban inn so that they could hear the cries of the town and better understand how it worked and the language its people spoke. Samuel Pepys, not averse to a ...”

“... the Atlantic than any other organisation. It was an embarrassing but hardly revelatory find: the king was the company’s titular governor and historians have long known of his shareholding. But it vividly illustrates the fact that the elite had a stake in the seamiest forms of overseas expansion.Because companies landed in unmapped and poorly understood ...”